Introduction of Becca~

“Hey Becca, baby,” Ethan put his arms around a crying Rebecca and stroke a hand through her brown, shoulder-length hair as she sobbed into his chest, her frail arms flung around his waist. He towered just about two heads over her, but it didn’t bother her. She liked that he was taller than her, and that she could put her arms around him and not worry about leaning down to put her head to his chest. His chest, that smelled of familiarity and Ethan, of home, a place that she wanted to be.
“Rebecca, tell me what’s wrong.” He held her at arms’ length and studied her with his green eyes, dark hair falling into his eyelashes, entangled into the black mess he called hair. Could she tell him? She gave him a weak smile as she ducked away his concern and out of his embrace, and she rubbed her eyes just gently not to smear out the dark circles around her eyes, the eyeliner. “Lynn is pregnant again.” She felt defeated saying it, like the final breath of a dying person. As if she didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be true at all. She sunk down into the couch in the middle of the square room, and drew her legs up to her body and into the couch, and put her arms around her legs to feel smaller than she was.
She could feel Ethans’ eyes on her where she sat, but she couldn’t care. She was scared, and she felt all alone. His concern made her heart flutter; it was rare that they cared so much about each other, when their relationship was based on something darker than love. “Lynn is pregnant?” Ethan sounded disbelieving, and Becca shook her head while she smiled ironically. “Yeah, one might think she’d stop after Nick. After all she’s put us through.”
Nick meant the world to her – her ten year old brother that was a shy and quiet boy for his age; he was always so frightened, and slept on a matrass on her bedroom floor because he didn’t want to sleep on their parent’s room. She understood him; the room smelled of heavy smoke and alcohol, but so did the rest of the house. The wooden table in front of the worn couch in the “living” room was filled with empty vodka bottles and drugs in green, yellow, red and blue. Hardly anyone did any living in there; it was just a place where they had to go through to get to their rooms. The house held two bedrooms; hers and her parents; and then there were the small kitchen entryway, and the bathroom.
“Yes, she’s pregnant, Ethan! She’s out drinking now and I can’t do anything about it.”
Ethan moved closer to her before he sat down beside her, and cupped her face in his hands. He kissed her lips softly, before his thumbs stroke across her nose, over the handful of freckles thrown over Becca’s cheeks and nose. “Don’t worry about that, babe. I’m here.”
She doubted that his distractions –even though she knew what distractions it was talk about-, could distract her from what Lynn and Steve had done. Not the bed activity while drunk, but the fact that they would consume more drugs, more vodka the next eight months, and that they didn’t have the economy to give birth to another baby. They barely had the money to keep their two children in school and food at the table.
Becca pushed Ethan away and he sat back as he drew a hand through his black hair. The stubbles on his cheeks indicated that he hadn’t shaved in days. “You know I can’t.” She rose abrutply to her feet. She paced back and forth, her fingers digging into her head as she did, lost in thought. Another baby – another child, into a family that was torn apart; she was the one being a ‘mother’ for Nick, because Lynn and Steve never took responsibility for what they had created. She never thought of Lynn and Steve as her parents, even though they were, with flesh and blood.
“Becca, baby, listen.” Ethan sat up, his eyes deep and thoughtful, and she had never seen him so intense like he appeared to be now. “Go get Nick and come back here. We’ll have some you and me time, play some board games with Nick. Watch a movie, I can make food.”
“Ethan, you’ve barely got money enough to-“
“I’ve been working. I can afford a cheap dinner and a movie, promise.”
Rebecca eyed her boyfriend suspiciously, before her arms fell to her sides and she let out a short sigh. “All right. Dinner and games and movie, it’s a date."
Ethan rose to his feet and cupped her face and kissed her lips gently again, happy. She remembered the first time they had kissed like this, in the rain at a hot April evening. It had been a year ago and they had met through a few friends, although they had been seeing each other across the hallways at school. Now they could say they were serious, whatever that meant. They both had a few on the sides that they could turn to when the other were boring. But neither of them cared, because they had each other.
No, Rebecca thought. Sharing Ethan was what she hated the most. She drew her hands through his soft hair before she looked up at him with her dark, brown eyes. “I’ll go get him, thanks.”
She tip-toed to his lips and kissed his chin playfully before she drew teasingly away from him.
“Babe, don’t do that. You know what that does to me.” He complained with a roll of his eyes.
She giggled in respond, “I know,” before she left out the door to fetch Nick.

“Lynn? Steve?” The door opened to their tiny house in the poorer area of the city. Her hair damp after the walk from Ethan’s, she drew a hand through it as she shrugged her jacket off. The instant the door opened she was hit with the smell of thick smoke and alcohol, and she grimaced as she entered the living room after putting her shoes in a mess in the corner. The sight that met her was not any pretty one. Steve rose from his worn, brown arm chair with a cigar between his lips and a vodka bottle in his hand, before he slammed it down on the table that made a protesting shake. “Rebecca Charlotte! Where’ve you been?!” He bawled at her as he threw the vodka bottle into the wall across from the television. Becca jumped back a step, her heart in her throat as she stared at her father – a tall, masculine man with dark brown eyes that seemed kind when he weren’t drunk; he now had stubbles longer than Ethan’s on his cheeks, and his hair starting to grow longer. “Where’s Lynn?” She nearly chocked the words out when he took a few steps forward, towards her. “Where’s Nick?” She heard how pleading her voice sounded. Not having him in her eyesight made her nervous – she never knew what Lynn and Steve were able to do when they had taken the drugs they did, or consumed the right amount of alcohol. “They’re out, eating candy.”
Becca felt her heart sink to the bottom of her stomach, relieved almost, because she would rather know they were out than here. Knowing her father and his moody mood when she always arrived home late –or in her case, not at all since the previous day, she embraced the idea of him screaming at her. Telling her how worthless she was, the same old thing. She cleared her face for any emotion as he drew closer to her, his hand lifted and their eyes locked.